Volume IV: What works, what matters, what lasts

Considering how students learn

January 9

Read over the following descriptions and try to identify your learning style, and consider the suggestions of ways you can help yourself when mismatches occur, so that you can make the most of your educational experiences.

After participating in the PKAL 2003 Assembly, Linking Insights About How People Learn to Curricular Reform, I offer some characteristics of an institution (college or university) that is having demonstrable success in linking insights about how people learn into the work of curricular transformation.

This seminal NRC report explores "how learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain, how existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn; ...and the relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace.

Research from the field of cognitive science provides one answer to two fundamental questions facing today's leaders intent on creating a learner-centered environment: 1) why is such an environment needed; 2) how can such an environment be realized?

"We have powerful models of human learning that we can use as a guide for the redesign of higher education– and higher education needs to be redesigned because, like it or not, virtually every variable in the higher education equation is changing at a rapidly accelerating rate."